In some multichannel radio systems having a plurality of outbound radio channels used by a plurality of multichannel radios, it has been found useful to define for each multichannel radio one of the plurality of outbound radio channels as a home control channel. Information and commands are sent to a multichannel radio, using the home control channel to notify the multichannel radio that information or commands are to be sent, and to indicate to the multichannel radio within which channel of the plurality of channels the information or command is to be sent. The set of home control channels forms a set of control channels, which may include all of the plurality of outbound channels used in the radio communication system, or may be a subset of the plurality of channels. The channels which are not control channels can be used for other purposes, such as temporarily assigning a multichannel radio to for receipt of a message which is long, or a message which has a bandwidth incompatible with the control channels. The number of control channels used in this type of system to achieve optimum efficiency typically varies depending on the statistics of the types of messages sent and the number of multichannel radios used. Therefore, it is desirable to be able to assign a home channel and change a home channel assignment of the multichannel radios in such a system.
A known technique of reassigning a home channel is to send an individual command to each multichannel radio, or each group of multichannel radios, commanding the multichannel radios to respond to a channel reassignment. For large systems, such as nationwide paging systems having zones which use a plurality of outbound control channels and have many thousands of multichannel pagers, individual and group addressing is very inefficient, however, because a command must be generated for each multichannel radio or group of multichannel radios requiring reassignment.
Thus, what is needed is a efficient means for efficiently changing a home control channel assignment for a multichannel radio in a radio communication system in which the number of control channels can vary.